WHO IS LABELLING VIOLENCE?

Most acts of violence are not considered a crime. However, when a person thinks of violence, he or she does not only think of the harm done, but also that the action is illegitimate. Yet ‘physical hurt done to others’ counts as violence only in certain contexts. To illustrate this point, the State can execute grievous harm, and this becomes termed as part of government or political organisation instead of violence. This is especially if the violence was used to bring about social order. Whenever the term violence is used, we must, therefore, ask the questions: who is labelling it, and what is the social position of the person or persons doing the labelling? In Jamaica we publicly label inner-city youth as troublemakers. The result has been that physical force used against them is often treated as something other than violence since it is thought that such treatment is necessary to maintain social order. Similarly, inner-city youth who use physical force against the police describe their actions as ‘resistance against Babylon’. In this context, they see themselves as the victims trying to escape oppression. Clearly then, violence is a concept that can be manoeuvred into an ideological ambience (Riches 1986). The nature of violence is problematic. The practice of violence is highly visible to the senses. This often has an impact on the way accounts of violence are relayed to the listener. The discharge of violence is also highly unpredictable, both in terms of the actual physical harm done and in terms of how a sequence of violent acts develops. This means that very few persons actually study violence carefully. In fact, most persons who write about violence do so from distant observation or from an ‘armchair’.